Bypassing SharePoint Document Library Security to retrieve documents
I needed to provide external access to items from selected folders in a SharePoint Services 2.0 Document Library. I couldn't give read access to the entire library (our only option in WSS 2.0) because allowing them to browse the entire folder tree was not an option. I found the best solution was to retrieve the binary directly from the WSS SQL database using the item's GUID. Code and details on my personal blog post located here.